Waterworld
by rhoddlet
Summary: Water, water everywhere and entirely too much to drink.


It is, as Ron has discovered, almost unmentionably nasty being in love with your best friend. Especially if you're not sure if you're really in love. Or what love is.  
  
Ex: It's been raining all afternoon, so of course Harry got absolutely and completely drenched during practice, and he comes back and wants a hot bath like he always does. The inconsiderate git leaves his wet things all around the room; you follow the sloshy footprints to the bathroom, where you find him lounging in the bathtub, clothes in a puddle on the floor and the water so hot that the mirrors, his glasses, the steel faucet-head – everything's covered in steam, and he's just lazing about with heels and elbows and head hanging around the edge. He hears you close the door, and opens his eyes to look at you – upside-down. You stand over him and admire the tiny little brown freckles across his cheekbones. He looks at you with those extraordinary eyes; you get down on your knees; he flips right side up to look you properly in the face, and kisses you – and then pulls you, shrieking and yelling, into the tub with him and dunks you a couple times for good measure. Your clothes go out of the tub; you stay in until the bathwater's cold and your fingers are so wrinkly you can't feel Harry's skin anymore.  
  
Ex: It's the middle of the night. You can't sleep, Harry's bed is empty, and some bizarre pain in your heart leads you out of the room, down the stairways, and rambling all over the school. It's possible, even after five years here, to get well and thoroughly lost, particularly since stairs sometimes lead up but not down, and rooms lead to other rooms. So you end up in a hallway you're fairly certain you've never been in before. There's a mosaic of a Nereid standing on top of a wave on one side and tall stained- glass windows showing the animals of the deep sea on the other. You can see all this by the moon that's coming through the stained glass.  
  
Everything below your knees is blue, not from cold, although the flagstones are pretty bad through the slippers, but from the glass in the windows. You hear a sound, from behind a curtain in a little alcove in the back of the hallway, and you get even colder than you were. The curtain goes all the way to the ground, and your legs are washed the same blue as the rest of the room, so you're pretty sure no one could see you.  
  
You can hear Harry's voice -- it's faint, muffled by the door, but after five years of yearning, guilt and hopelessly tangled desire . . . Well, you certainly ought to recognize it. And then, there's that other voice, low and smooth and ever so insulting. Scuffling feet, a thump, and a sudden low cry. You're about to charge in and help Harry when you recognize the languid vowels, blink twice in that blue-washed room with the moon shining down on you creep back to your room like a thief.  
  
The next morning, Harry shows up with a split lip, bruises on his arms, and a cut on his forehead. You walk in on him brushing his teeth, and he looks at you for a moment, as if expecting you to say something about it, so you just ask to see his Geomancy homework at breakfast. You wonder if he knows that you know.  
  
You wonder what he would say if you asked him about it.  
  
Being in love with your best friend is excruciating; you can't imagine what it would be like if he loved you back.  
  
You get hints sometimes. He'll say something to you, sometimes, with the strangest expression around the mouth. Look you in the eye sometimes, with a strange expression in his. That Sunday you went down to Hogsmeade after Charlie died. You remember trying to drink yourself to oblivion with butterbeer, and then Harry showing up next to you, grimly working on your fourth tankard. He took one look at you, went away for a little bit, then came back with some Muggle stuff called vodka which he put into your butterbeer. He'd walked you back up to Hogwarts afterwards, and held you and kept Hermione away while you cried and cried in the bathroom and threw up in between. You still remember being in his arms, the cold bathroom tiles on your legs, your tears rolling down his cheeks.  
  
Dumbledore gave Harry permission to go to Charlie's funeral, so he came, but you hadn't said anything to him or to Ginny when the three of you got on the Hogsmeade train. They sat on the seats across from you, and Ginny eventually fell asleep on Harry's shoulder.  
  
It'd been a cloudy, dampish November afternoon. The twins stood on one side of you, pale and white, and Ginny was on the other; you could hear her crying into Mum's dress. Bill and Percy were lowing the casket into their ground with their wands; your father was beside the tombstone, reading something about Charlie, the loving son, and trying very hard not to cry like Percy was.  
  
Everybody else -- Harry, Charlie's co-workers, Dad's co-workers -- was on the other side of the grave. Harry came up to afterwards and tried to talk to you; you could see that he'd been crying, and because of that, you said things back to him and talked to him and late that night, let him kiss you when the two of you were alone in your old bedroom.  
  
You'd never felt so alone in your entire life.  
  
You'd never been lonely before, in fact. There was Harry and Hermione, and before them, there'd been your family. You'd envied them and teased them and at times honestly hated Percy, but you'd never been alone like this.  
  
At dinner, everybody had talked, and your father asked Harry lots of questions about Muggles, and Percy tried to butt in by telling your father what his boss, Fudge, thought of it all. The twins even played a little practical joke involving empty coffee cups and mice, but your mother had burst into tears and run from the room in the middle of it.  
  
She came back a few minutes later with her face freshly washed and the dessert pie in her hands. You'll never forget, though, this first time that you saw her as a human being.  
  
The fact of Charlie being dead aches and niggles and pushes at you. You sometimes imagine that He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named had something to do with it, but as far as you know, he was crossing the street, forgot to look both ways, and a Muggle truck plowed him under.  
  
When you got back to school, Crabbe made a stupid comment about how Muggle- lovers got what they deserved, and so you punched him in the face. Crabbe promptly broke your wand in two and then proceeded to punch you in the face until the teachers came.  
  
For some reason, probably because you'd just 'lost' Charlie, the teachers decided that Crabbe had to be punished too. So the two of you had both served three days of detention -- with McGonagall, which wasn't too bad -- and Crabbe had to buy a new wand for you from Ollivander's.  
  
It'd been the first new wand that you'd ever had, and it was an absolutely marvelous birch one with a hair from a griffon as the heart. You loved it, and didn't care when a few weeks later, during Divination, Draco said that he had had a dream of a redheaded weasel living in a church poor-box. And then you happened to look over at Harry, who had somehow acquired a split lip and finger-shaped bruises on his arms from last night, and he was refusing to look at Malfoy with this other look on his face . . .  
  
And then Harry had been missing from his bed that night, and you'd left your bed to go look for him in the room with the sea as the floor.  
  
The next morning, you found him brushing his teeth, with that extra cut on his forehead, and he won't talk to you about it, and during breakfast, you catch him watching you with this sudden pained expression in his eyes. When he sees that you've caught him, he'll turn away, embarrassed, says something inane to Hermione, but you notice that his eyes slip over to the Slytherin table, and he has that same painful look again.  
  
When he does stay in bed all night, he'll cry out in his sleep, whisper, thrash.  
  
When you get out of Divination tomorrow, the first thing you're going to do is pick a fight with Draco.  
  
He's broken Harry: you'd like to see him replace that. 


End file.
